


Write the Holiday Cards

by Arej



Series: Ineffable Advent 2019 [24]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Established Relationship, Kisses, M/M, Other, but they'll get there, there's a lot to make up for with six thousand years of history, they're not really male but it's m/m since i used male pronouns throughout, they're together but there will still be things they haven't said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:40:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21949201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arej/pseuds/Arej
Summary: Day 24 for the advent calendar of prompts.The arrival of a holiday card prompts a confession from Aziraphale - and a long-overdue response from Crowley.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffable Advent 2019 [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561027
Comments: 9
Kudos: 126





	Write the Holiday Cards

“What’ve you got there, angel?”

Aziraphale passes over the parcel in his hands, which Crowley discovers is not a parcel at all, but a card. The sparkling gold snowflakes on the front shed glitter on his hands as he tilts it back and forth to make the ‘Season’s Greetings’ emblazoned in foil print catch the light. When he flips it open to glance inside, more glitter cascades to the floor.

“It’s from Tracy and Sergeant Shadwell,” Aziraphale offers, looking through the rest of the post. Crowley looks more closely at the names displayed below the generic message - one in flowing cursive, the other in no-nonsense block lettering. Tracy and Shadwell. 

A glance at the envelope, still in Aziraphale’s hands and winking merrily with wayward glitter flecks, confirms his suspicion: Tracy has addressed the card. It was likely her idea to begin with; she seemed the thoughtful sort, for all the two second impression he’d got of her at the airbase. Shadwell certainly wasn’t the type for holiday cards, anyway - half a century of funding his so-called army, and the most Crowley had gotten around the holidays was a reminder that bonuses were well appreciated by the recruits.

“There’s a letter, too. They found a cottage and - oh - moved out of London in August. We should have sent a gift,” Aziraphale frets. He scans the rest of the letter, handwritten in the same flowing cursive that graces the envelope front. “Oh, Tracy is thinking of starting a little garden in the spring.”

“I’ll send her some cuttings,” Crowley replies absently, flipping the card over and releasing another shower of glitter to the floor. When he looks up from the mess, Aziraphale is smiling at him, eyes gone soft and fond. “What?”

“That’s very sweet of you, my dear.”

Crowley shuffles and passes the card back to Aziraphale, who slides it - glitter flying - back into the envelope. 

“She helped,” he mutters in explanation, and what he’s trying to say is _she helped save the world_ , but what he really means is _she helped bring you back to me_.

Aziraphale seems to hear the latter, even if Crowley won’t say it; he presses a quick kiss to the demon’s cheek before bustling away with the post. Trying to will away the sudden flush on his face, Crowley follows.

“Did we -” he stops, corrects. How embarrassing. “Did you send holiday cards this year?”

Mercifully, Aziraphale doesn’t seem to have caught his presumptuous slip. “No, I haven’t. I never really got into the habit of holiday cards.”

Odd; Crowley has gotten a card from Aziraphale every year since they first appeared in the 1840s. He’d half expected them to stop coming during his prolonged nap, or at least a few years into it, but there had been a veritable mountain of them to sort through after waking, each and every one containing a beautiful copperplate recounting of the angel’s activities for the preceding year. They hadn’t stopped once he awoke, either; every December, without fail, Crowley finds a card and its accompanying letter. The angel hasn’t missed a year, and he would know - the letters sit in the back of his safe, tied with ribbon, one shed and surreptitiously pocketed angel feather tucked beneath the bow.

So he’s sentimental; no one needs to know.

“You always send cards,” Crowley counters, confused. There is a flush crawling up Aziraphale’s neck, so he presses, “I’ve always gotten one.”

“Yes, well, you’re different.”

The flush says embarrassed, but the smile Aziraphale turns on him is sappy and romantic. Crowley feels his heart melting even as his own mouth curves in an answering smile. “Oh?” he teases, swaying close. “Was it so necessary to keep your hereditary enemy informed of your actions?”

“We had an Arrangement,” Aziraphale teases back. The post is placed absently on a nearby table as he reaches for Crowley, who goes willingly. “I’m an angel of my word.”

“You kept up both sides of the Arrangement while I was…away.”

They never talked about it, after; how Aziraphale had somehow not only intercepted Crowley’s orders, but completed his paperwork, filed his reports while the demon slept most of a century away. Even the holiday cards had contained only the vaguest references to such activity, and only at first; later letters neatly skirted the issue entirely. It held - holds? - a statement so powerful neither of them have been able, or willing, to approach the subject directly, for fear of what it might reveal. For Crowley, that he trusted Aziraphale to watch his back so implicitly that a decades-long nap stretched uninterrupted, save for the barest corporation maintenance; for Aziraphale, that he cared enough to protect not only Crowley, but his standing in Hell, even after their disastrous fight in the park. 

But that’s over now. They can talk about it, now.

“Of course,” Aziraphale replies, sliding his hands from Crowley’s hips to his back, fingers splayed across the angles of his shoulder blades. “You needed me.”

“I’ve always needed you,” Crowley confesses, threading his own fingers through angelic curls. He uses his handhold to tilt the angel’s face up - or Aziraphale, reading the intent in his eyes and the honesty in his voice, offers his face under Crowley’s questioning hands. It’s impossible to tell.

It doesn’t matter, either way. Crowley leans down, just barely, and whispers the rest of his confession across Aziraphale’s lips.

“I’ll always need you.”

The kiss that follows is light, the gentlest brush of Crowley’s mouth over Aziraphale’s, but it carries weight. It carries the weight of all the things he hadn’t said after waking to find an army of holiday cards - gathered in chronological order, with a helpful date in the back corner of each envelope - lined up across his desk. It carries the weight of the realization that the angel had been in his home, had intercepted Hell memos there, had very likely written out his reports in his best imitation of Crowley’s spiky scrawl there, too. He must have done the reports at Crowley’s; there would be too much risk something angelic might cling to the paperwork if he took it to the bookshop, some wayward scrap of ethereal grace that imbues the whole place, seeps into the walls and the books, too. No, his angel is too careful for that, and not a fan of writing in unfamiliar places. He would have stayed at that same desk, working in the slowly vanishing open space, surrounded by ranks of unopened cards - by the growing evidence of Crowley’s absence.

And yet Aziraphale had persisted, steadfast and steady, year after year.

The thought of that, of his angel working quietly on Crowley’s abandoned paperwork while the demon slumbered just a room away, unaware - it has sat in his ribcage, in the dark space under his heart, for decades. It has become a light in his darkest moments, a talisman against the shadows of doubt and vanishing self-worth: Aziraphale cared enough to make that sacrifice, to carry on with the Arrangement purely for Crowley’s benefit, so he must care _something_ for Crowley, too. 

Crowley pours it all, every unspoken thought and unvoiced feeling, every realization he hasn’t known what to do with, everything he has wanted so desperately to say, into the press of his lips against Aziraphale’s. His fingers tremble where they’re buried in soft white curls, and his shoulders tremble where Aziraphale holds him close, and his lips tremble there, where they kiss, where he pours out his confession with a closed mouth.

Aziraphale opens beneath him in answer, a confession offered right back, and Crowley gasps into it, steals the air he needs from the angel’s lungs and sighs it back. It’s Aziraphale who presses, now, who speaks his voiceless answer with lips and tongue and teeth, hands curled gently in the fabric of Crowley’s shirt to hold him there, hold him up, hold him close.

They sway where they stand, overwhelmed, and pull back to trade the barest sliver of breath from mouth to mouth. Crowley presses his forehead to Aziraphale’s, smooths now-steady hands down to frame his face, elbows tucked tight inside the circle of the angel’s arms. Aziraphale releases enough shirt to slide one hand into Crowley’s hair, uses his grip to press their foreheads closer together.

“Will you help me write the holiday cards this year, my love?” he asks into the warmth between them.

Crowley huffs a laugh and shifts enough to press a kiss - quick, fleeting, light in touch and in meaning, this time - to upturned lips. “Yes. Yes, of course, angel. I’ll help.”


End file.
